How to Write Water Characters in Chinese

Series Summary

The Chinese language has produced many poets studied all over the world, including Du Fu, Bai Juyi, and Li Po. Thousand of poems from these three authors remain, some translated by famous writers such as Ezra Pound and others featured in productions at Disney’s Epcot Center. Chinese is written in characters, and much debate has arisen concerning how exactly these figures became associated with the words or ideas they represent. Some scholars believe much of the Chinese system is made up of ideograms and pictograms, symbols that look like the things they represent. Other scholars consider Chinese more abstract, claiming that the characters represent words or sounds without trying to look like anything at all, like letters in English.

In this free video series, graduate student and teaching assistant Esther-Xiaohua Liu will show you how to write Chinese characters by using the radical for "water." If any Chinese character contains the "Three-Dot-Water" radical, it will have some association to shui or "water." Learn to speak and write the characters for juice, converge, the Milky Way, sweat, dirt, soup, pond, irrigate, float, and many more! Esther-Xiaohu will give you what you need to recognize these water words in print today!

Video Transcript

"In this clip all the words I am going to talk about have the same radical, Sun Den Shui. Shui means water. Sun means three, Den, dots so Shui is exactly a word, a Chinese word for water. When this word works as a radical we write in this way so this one, two, three is a radical. Since this radical comes from the word water, shui, so you can guess most characters with this radical, sun den shui must have some relationship with water, related to water."